The symbol of the bride has been central in religious literature all over the world. Her image has dominated the literary imagination of the prophets of the Old Testament, Christian saints, Hindu Bhaktas, Sūfī Shaikhs, and the Sikh Gurūs. Whether we pick up the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, the twenty-first of Revelation, St. Teresa's Interior Castle, Mīrā Bāī's Padāvalī, Ibn al-Arabī's Tarjumān al Ashwāq, or Gurū Nānak's Bārah Māh, we find the figure of the young and beautiful bride depicted in the most vivid images. In her excellent essay “The Bride of Israel: The Ontological Status of Scripture in the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Traditions,” Barbara A. Holdrege has written about the prevalence of bridal imagery in rabbinic literature, where Israel is referred to as the bride of God and the Torah in turn as the bride of Israel. The Church has also been designated as the bride of Christ in the New Testament. The presence of the bridal symbol acquires an even more interesting dimension when we think that many of these authors have been men. To express the ineffable urge for union with the Divine, humans have resorted to the relationship most intimate to them: that of the bride and the bridegroom.

From the countless brides who are endowed with such immense symbolic significance throughout world literature, it is the bride of the Gurū Granth that we shall single out.